Category — Containers

 ”What’s a Wardian case?” my sister asked, when I told her in an email that I’d just acquired one.

As well she might. These days, most people call them terrariums, or mini-greenhouses, or cuter names which I’ll refrain from using.

But if you grow imported plants – and almost everyone does – Wardian cases are an invisible but important part of your garden. Back in the days before air freight, or even steam shipping and railroads, plant explorers were often frustrated by the amount of plants that arrived dead. Sailing ships might take many months to go from, say, South America or India or China to Europe. There was no temperature control, and fresh water was at a premium. I imagine sailors looking askance at the plant collector who wanted to use valuable drinking and cooking water for a bunch of dead-looking roots.

Plant collectors who shipped their acquisitions with other people had even more problems. Years ago, I wrote a book review on Anne Leighton’s history of U.S.  horticulture. (It’s really a history of white anglo upper-class U.S. horticulture, so it’s incomplete, but fascinating.) In one of her books, she quotes a rather crabby letter to a sea captain who was entrusted with bringing plants from a collector here to a plant enthusiast in England.

The sea captain, it appears, had not been too anxious to spend water or time on the plants, so they sat in unfortunate places on the journey, and more than half of them died. The other ones weren’t in great shape, either.

The English plant collector’s frustration was more than we might experience by ordering from a catalogue that ships us puny, half-dead plants. Plant importers of the time were rabid plant nuts, somewhat like old rose enthusiasts now: they looked for the unusual, the long-hidden, the thing that everybody else didn’t have. The plants they imported were expensive and unique. It might take years to replace them. Or they might never be available again.

Plant collectors were also commercial. In the 1700s, wealthy people began to show off their money and culture by growing imported plants on their estates. Imported plants were rare, pricey, and something your neighbor could envy. They were an ideal way to genteelly show your wealth.

The working class, meanwhile, was importing plants in the old-fashioned way: gardeners have been taking seeds and cuttings from wealthy employers for a long time. Once in the cottage gardens, the exotic plants spread from hand to hand.

By the mid-1800s, middle-class homeowners had adopted the exotic-plant craze, – on a smaller scale, of course. Imported plants had become big business, and smart horticultural entrepreneurs were springing up everywhere.

New technology made this possible. New technology in the form of a Wardian case.

In 1829, Dr. Nathaniel BagshawWard discovered that plants could survive for very long times under glass without care.  He was actually tying to create an entomology exhibit, a case holding a moth pupa in a “natural environment”.

 As time went by, he noticed that the ferns he’d put in as part of the environment were surviving well – better than the ones in his garden, in fact, which were overrun by smog (they called it “pea-soupers” back then, but it was still smog).

The tightly sealed environment allowed plants to survive where before they died miserably. The Hookers, a father and son plant exploring team, knew Ward, and they were quick to see its use. On their Antarctic expedition, they shipped back plants in Wardian cases. Successfully.

Ward became interested in the commercial uses of his case, and experimented by shipping English ferns and grasses to Sydney, Australia – then a six-month journey by sea. The plants arrived in perfect shape, and the native Australian plants he brought back to England on an 8-month trip (they hit a lot of storms) did well, too.

After that, they were quickly adopted, not only by plant hunters but by plant growers who enjoyed having their own little worlds to construct and put on a parlor table. Terrariums are the modern descendants of Wardian cases, and they are still pleasing for the same reasons.

Those of you who are interested only in the history of Wardian cases can stop reading now. Those of you who are toying with the notion of your own Wardian case, or just wonder what kinds of shapes and sizes they come in, can keep reading.  Because my own connection with Wardian cases is also something of a commercial venture.

Daffodil Planter, who edits and blogs at H. Potter, as well as her own blog  and the enticing morsels of Dirt du Jour, told me that, if I was one of the first 25 people to sign on as an H. Potter affiliate, I would get a Wardian case.

A Wardian case is a long-held garden fantasy of mine. Not one I tell to a lot of people, since I hate to be thought of as a “cute” gardener. But, well, there is an appeal in having a tiny world you can design to your taste. Much of the world is out of our control, so it’s nice to think that this shoebox-sized patch is  mine, all mine.

Since I know H. Potter containers are well-made, I feel fine about advertising them. And since I got my own Wardian case, I’ve been admiring it from different angles. At last I have a greenhouse. Even if it’s tiny.

I love the little cross-shaped openings that act as vents, just like a real greenhouse

And the completely unnecessary but very appealing spiral metal edging.

If you want to indulge your own fantasy and look at more Wardian cases, click that nice discreet terrarium ad on my right sidebar.

If you want ideas about how to plant a Wardian case, check out English Creek Gardens,  or read Tovah Martin’s post on terrariums for children at the H. Potter blog.  (Tovah Martin is a member of the family at Logee’s, a nursery that’s been growing greenhouse plants since Victorian days.)

If you’re an orchid grower, this post  by Susan Taylor can give you ideas for making a tiny greenhouse full of orchids. And if you want to get even more exotic, you can have a case full of carnivorous plants .

I’m not sure yet what I’ll plant in my Wardian case. I’m still dealing with fall planting, so I have all winter to fantasize. I could go for the original Wardian-type fern planting. But then again, a Wardian case allows me to grow tropical plants I couldn’t otherwise manage.

I’ll have a lot of fun deciding.

Last year, I talked about the joys of self-watering planters, the types I use (including one especially for water plants) , and the enormous amounts of water (and plants) you can save with them.

This year, I’m going to broaden my self-watering horizons a little, and introduce more ways to have affordable water-saving containers for different garden purposes. All the photographs here are from my own self-watering containers, to give you some ideas on how you can use them in the garden.

Even those of you who mostly plant in the ground could take advantage of self-waterers.

What about all those seedlings and small plants that need constant watering to make it to the point where you plant them? If you have a timed watering system, great, but if you can’t afford one, or you want something more water-conservative than a sprinkler going off four times a day, you might want to consider these humble self-waterers, made out of old 2-liter plastic bottles.

The simplest big self-waterer are the kinds I’ve described in past posts: put a large pot in a large bowl, or put a short bucket in a longer bucket.

A little more sophisticated, but along these humble lines, is this amusing, fast-paced video on making self-watering containers out of 5-gallon buckets.

A system that  some refinements, not to mention more space to plant, is the tote-box-container method at Josho.com, laid out in text, with good clear instructions and photos.   One writeup I saw on this method extolled self-watering tote boxes for their greatness for tomatoes. They would also work well with other large plants, as well as being good containers for a crowd of plants instead of single specimens.

If you prefer a more stately approach, try this video from Tom Cole, head of department at a horticultural college in London.  (If you’d rather read directions that watch a video, there’s a list of instructions on the same page. ) It’s a more elaborate video on the same topic, with a careful and thought-out approach. You could use the same 5-gallon pails, or you could use the garden container of your choice, as long as it doesn’t have a hole in the bottom.

This page  shows the two-pot method, where you put two pots together to create one self-watering container. In the photos, they show terracotta pots, though, and these pots are heavy water-users, since they diffuse water through their porous walls. They do show one painted, which helps, but if you’re really looking to save water, don’t use terracotta. Unless you’ve got some plant, like a succulent or Mediterranean herb, that really doesn’t want much water – just some.

Mike Lieberman gives a low-key, low-price approach to making self-watering containers: the container-in-container method, the container-with-a-pipe method, and the vinyl tile method, which was new to me.  This is just a guy sitting in his basement, but he really knows his stuff, and shows it to you clearly.

In these videos, the urban organic gardener (as Mike Lieberman styles himself) gives you everything, including his tips on where he gets free materials for containers, how to keep track of your containers, so you know which proportions of tank to plant work best, the principles of self-watering containers – plus really good directions on how to actually make them. He gives written material lists, to make it easy. Even I, challenged in handiness skills, was not intimidated by his anyone-can-make-it-dirty style.

With a little ingenuity, most of these DIY versions can be adapted to use scavenged containers that are a little more appealing than a 5-gallon bucket. Flea markets, garage sales, dumps, trash for removal on the street can all be rich fields for mining container material. The essence of DIY is to open your eyes and use what’s around you. DIY can save more resources than water. We just have to use our imaginations more than our pocketbooks.

My lavender is dead.

As the Munchkins put it, “Really most sincerely dead.”

Some months ago, I wrote about my new plan for this strawberry jar, which had killed a lot of things for me, including strawberries. On the high of hubris, I figured that such water-conserving plants as iris and lavender would, finally, work for this pot, would make it beautiful and lush, would fulfill the dream that every gardener has, of making a little paradise.

I thought, in my happy little saint-of-the-plants fantasies, that I was the one who had finally worked out the terra-cotta-wicking problem to my advantage. That this brilliant solution, which nobody else had thought of before, would bring life where before there had been only death. I thought, in short, that I knew better.

I was wrong.

I might have been warned by the responses on my original post: most people had tales of strawberry-jar woe to relate. There was one benighted person desperate to find a strawberry jar; clearly this was someone who had never planted in one. The only success stories were of succulents, and one comment on success from someone who lives in a much wetter climate than I do.

Which leads us to the question: how did strawberry jars get to be so widely used in dry climates? Every discount store and garden store stocks them; they are featured in garden photos (in my area, most of them come from Mexico, so they are pretty, with incised designs).

And yet, a lot of us can’t grow a damn thing in them.

Was the inventor of strawberry jars a sadist, a misanthrope who saw a perfect opportunity to show gardeners that pride goeth before a fall, and a haughty spirit before destruction? Was it a misphyto, who wanted plants to die before they reached fruition? A purist who believed that plants should be wild and free, not contained? Or is it just one of those inexplicable fads, like pet rocks or back-combed hair, that keep rising time after time to the rhythm of human needs?

Why did I get so determined to make the strawberry jar work for me?

Maybe one of the best things gardening teaches us is that there’s a time to let go, change form; that none of us can mold nature to our will, only work with it. In the northern hemisphere, this time of year really brings that home.

So: everything passes. And, as gardening (and all of nature) remind us, everything rises again.

I’ll try the succulents.

Some of you may be puzzled. Why am I writing about water plants and saving water in the same article?

Because when you put them in the right kind of container, water plants take almost no watering at all.

The photo at the top of the page shows one of my mints, in a water-saving container I found at my local dump (the woman who runs it is kind enough to pull out useful items and put them by her kiosk. A small contribution to her dog-treat fund gets you your choice).

I didn’t feature this self-watering container in my series, because I’m not sure it would work for anything but plants who like to have their feet in water. The container is basically a 5-gallon bucket with another, shorter bucket of the same diameter (the red one) set into it. The bottom of the red bucket is drilled with sieve-like holes; it looks as if someone did them with a hammer and nail. (If you do that, be sure to hammer in the inside of the pail, so the little extrusion is headed toward the water. A more sophisticated way would be to drill it.)

At the end of this process, you have a short bucket with holes in the bottom sitting atop an empty space in a 5-gallon bucket. That empty space becomes the water tank.

It’s a perfect bucket for mint, containing it from running all over the place, as well as keeping it fresh and healthy. It would also work well for Siberian iris, pitcher plants, gotu kola (in summer), equisetum, even cattails and some kinds of bamboo or papyrus. Anything that likes its roots in water.

How often do I water my mint? I top it up maybe once a month with a quart or two. Granted, the first filling of the water tank takes a few gallons. Granted, it’s a little awkward and messy lifting the top bucket out of the bottom one. (But who would become a gardener if they didn’t have a tolerance, even a liking, for mess and awkwardness?) But the mint bucket sitting on top keeps water from evaporating, the mint looks fine, and the whole contraption is handy for cutting when I need it. I keep several kinds of mint this way; the buckets make it easy to have a collection that doesn’t get out of hand.

I don’t have a greenhouse, but Peter Henderson had several. So I’m going to him for information on how to save water in a greenhouse.

Those of you who look askance at this old information: think about how much energy modern greenhouse systems often take. Should we turn up our noses at simple solutions if they work, and cost us less in water, time, energy, and money?

Henderson, one of the up-and-coming plantsmen of the 19th century, had an avid interest in solutions that saved all of those things. Managing a thriving nursery business in New Jersey, he felt he was growing in a climate most garden books don’t address, one that was hot and arid. Really, he was comparing his climate to Britain, where English-language gardening books came from. In 1874, U.S.-oriented garden books were still a novelty, though they’d been around since the 1840s (Henderson himself was one of the first in the field). Britain was the standard of reference for the English-speaking gardener.

OK, so compared to Britain, New Jersey is certainly hot, but arid? Anyone who’s sweated softly through the hot steam that is summer air in New Jersey, and seen the basement dehumidier tank fill in half a day, will wonder at that idea. I think he meant that it rains less than it does in Britain. The state of New Jersey’s climate is useful information when considering Henderson’s greenhouse methods, because you know they work in very humid and hot environments.

“A point indispensable in our hot and arid climate is, that all plants in the green-house should stand on close benches, overlaid with sand or ashes, or some such material. This keeps plants moist and prevents the plants from suffering, if any omission occurs in watering. We know that the practice in many places is entirely different from this, the plants being stood on benches of open slat-work. No plant can be kept healthy in such a place, unless with at least double the labor of watering necessary with those standing on sand. This, like many other of our mistakes, is copied from a mode pursued in England, where a colder, moister, and less sunny climate may make it a necessary practice.”

Interestingly, most greenhouses still use the open slatwork benches, or something akin to them. Maybe the U.S. is still in allegiance to England, at least as far as gardening is concerned. Or maybe there are climates where Henderson’s method just doesn’t work. But it sure seems worth a try in places where greenhouse plants suffer from heat and dryness in summer.

For keeping the plants cool, Henderson recommended a then-new ventilation system which opened greenhouse sashes, a single crank-lever serving them all. I’m not sure if Henderson used this method, but old-time greenhouse keepers often painted whitewash on the windows in summer for shade. (Whitewash is a combination of powdered lime and water, and was used as a cheap-and-easy paint on farms for ages.) Whitewash is easily scraped off when cold weather comes again; it’s basically just sprayed-on lime powder, and whatever scrapings are left will actually be good for your plants.

What are your own low-tech greenhouse secrets? When I have a greenhouse, I don’t want it to be a water and energy hog. So I’m collecting information.